(19 April 2026) Stocks rallied for the third straight week after the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz signaled a possible end to the conflict with Iran. Recent gains have seen the main indexes push to new all-time highs as investors have largely put Middle East geopolitics in the rear-view mirror.
The size and speed of the rally has been somewhat surprising as the Mercury-Jupiter aspect in early April tends to have only a modest bullish influence. Also, I had thought the approaching Mercury-Mars conjunction — the fifth in the current sequence that began in October — tends to have a bearish effect on stocks. The key word here is “tends” as backtesting of previous similar conjunctions showed a fairly wide distribution of outcomes even if the negative ones outnumbered the positive.
I would also note the quadruple geocentric conjunction of Mars, Neptune, Mercury and Saturn from April 12 to April 20 was unprecedented. This four-planet alignment has never occurred in the past 130 years for which we have data for the DJIA. As such, it became a bit of a wild card with unpredictable consequences. Even the triple conjunction of Mercury, Mars and Saturn on April 19-20 was very rare and has only occurred three times since 1896. As I discussed previously, these three previous alignments had widely disparate outcomes — one bearish in 1966, one neutral in 1996 and one bullish in 1998. I thought the absence of other bullish or bearish alignments this time around pointed to a more neutral and choppy market outcome but that clearly was not the case.
In hindsight, the heliocentric chart may have held the key to this huge April rally. As the chart above shows, bullish Jupiter formed a very tight, degreewise alignment with the Earth, Venus, Mercury and Chiron as all five planets were between 1 and 3 degrees of their respective sidereal signs. That is also rare (occurring just twice before during the past 130 years) and statistically-based predictions more difficult.
We can also make honorable mention of Jupiter’s sidereal transit conjunction with the 7:52 a.m. Ascendant of the NYSE horoscope. On Friday, April 17, Jupiter (23Ge07) was just a eight arc minutes past an exact conjunction with the NYSE Ascendant (22Ge59). Jupiter is currently moving at a rate of 6 arc minutes per day and was exactly conjunct the Ascendant on Thursday. This conjunction only occurs once every 12 years and should also be considered a bullish influence. And we should note that these are sidereal positions using the Lahiri/Krishnamurti ayanamsa which are precession-corrected. In the tropical zodiac this Jupiter-Ascendant conjunction occurred way back on Aug 10, 2025. Score a point for the sidereal zodiac there…
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